


friendly fire

by Silver_Snek



Series: Snek's Star 'Verse [10]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Clone Troopers (Star Wars), Clone Trooper Angst (Star Wars), Clone Troopers (Star Wars) Need Hugs, Clone Troopers and Children (Star Wars), Clones, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fix-It of Sorts, Force-Sensitive Clone Troopers (Star Wars), Friends to Enemies, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Heavy Heavy Topics, Heavy topics, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Jedi Purge (Star Wars), Jedi as Found Family (Star Wars), M/M, Mando'a Language (Star Wars), Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, On the Run, Post-Order 66 (Star Wars), Promise, Protective Clone Troopers (Star Wars), Purge Troopers - Freeform, Rebellion, Rebellion Era (Star Wars), Slavery, but it gets better, like seriously, probably
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-17 14:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29718516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silver_Snek/pseuds/Silver_Snek
Summary: What it had been, once upon a time, didn’t matter. It had a shock-staff in its hands and armor as black as night, and that was what kept it functioning. It moved with predatory grace as it stalked through the ice wastes. It had orders to detain or neutralize a deserter, and the trail had led it to Scipio.Somewhere, buried under layers upon layers of code and Darkness, a man grieved for the younger brother he had considered to be his son as he ventured the planet the latter had died on.Or, in which a purge trooper, a MIA commander, an Inquisitor, and a Jedi make an unlikely team, but they were family before the Order. Maybe they could be family again.
Relationships: CC-1010 | Fox & Clone Commander Thorn, CC-1010 | Fox & Clone Commander Thorn & Original Clone Trooper Character(s), CC-1010 | Fox & Original Clone Trooper Character(s), CC-1010 | Fox & Quinlan Vos, CC-1010 | Fox/Quinlan Vos, Clone Commander Thorn & Quinlan Vos, Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Series: Snek's Star 'Verse [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907557
Comments: 12
Kudos: 46
Collections: Commander Fox





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I blame Thell and Aero for this. Love you but also fuck you.

(What it had been, once upon a time, didn’t matter. It had a shock-staff in its hands and armor as black as night, and that was what kept it functioning. It moved with predatory grace as it stalked through the ice wastes. It had orders to detain or neutralize a deserter, and the trail had led it to Scipio.

Somewhere, buried under layers upon layers of code and Darkness, a man grieved for the younger brother he had considered to be his son as he ventured the planet the latter had died on.)

Jack. His name was Jack Thorne. He reminds himself of this fact every morning as he threads his way through Scipio’s underbelly. Every single damned morning as he drags himself to Zako’s hideout. Thorn  _ ad be _ Fox died on that landing strip.

His scars burn.

People rush past him, their eyes filled with terror, and Thorn jumped in both confusion and shock. There was no discernible reason for them to be like this— at least, not until Moni, one of his more kind-hearted neighbors, grabbed Thorn’s arm. 

“Jackie-boy, haul ass!” she hissed. “Those damn Imperials sent a purge trooper! I dunno what we did this time, but get your feet moving  _ now _ !”

“Shit!” He’s already moving, feet blurring under him as he takes off after her, shoving his scarf up over his face hastily. Zako would have to wait. “Where’s the bastard?”

“I don’t fucking—  _ augh! _ ” A single blaster bolt slammed into her, and Moni went down, hitting the concrete with a pained cry. The street went silent as the rats of Scipio’s underworld froze. The purge trooper was here, and there was no running. The air itself reeked of fear. 

“Turn over the defector or suffer the wrath of the Empire,” a modulated voice intoned, taking a second staff from their back and igniting them both with a crackle and buzz. The red electricity danced on the rod, beautiful yet deadly.

“Prime’s hairy left nutsack,” he swore, taking a step back. “Moni, go home. Get to your kids. I… I can distract him.” He would know the voice of a brother anywhere, modulated or not. 

(The trooper watched the woman scramble up and stagger away, gasping in pain. She was not what it came here for. It was here for a defector.)

“I haven’t heard a brother’s voice in a long time,” Thorn said, tugging his scarf down to reveal a face both familiar and foreign. The sides of his head had been shaved, the remaining hair pulled back carelessly in a bun. A new scar breaks the formerly smooth line of his nose, and his eyes are dim yet unflinching in the face of death.

(It keeps its staffs out, prepared to fight and kill the [TRAITOR].) 

“Clone trooper, you are under arrest for defecting from the Great Imperial Army.”

Thorn offers up his wrists. The Empire couldn’t be much worse than the Republic, and freedom… freedom had lost its appeal. What was the difference, really, between one set of chains and another? The Republic, the Empire, Zako… they were all the same to him. Maybe the Empire would finally put him down.

“State identification number,” they ordered.

“CC-7041, callsign ‘Thorn’, he recited automatically, rattling off the numbers with practiced familiarity. “You’re a cold one, brother. No welcome back for a long-lost  _ vod _ ?”

(It froze as it was cuffing the [TRAITOR], then buckled it on with much more force than necessary. It noted that for its report— it would have to be reprogrammed.)

“CC-7041 was killed in action.”

“Check the ident tattoo, if you want. Number’s there, just like everyone else.” He winced at the cuffs, then turned over his wrist, showing the purge trooper his barcode.

(It stared at the identification code, armored fingers digging in deep into his wrist before it let go, taking several steps back.)

“ _ Hey _ , buddy, ouch!”

(It wanted— no, it didn’t want, it could not want, it had no wants— it needed to get away from Thorn. Thorn— hazy memories of shared grins and shared secrets, of wishing for a life other than—

— No. It needed to be reprogrammed. It did not know what this [TRAITOR] was. It did not matter.)

Thorn frowned. “You don’t look so good, buddy.”

The purge trooper growled as they half-dragged Thorn to the Imperial ship waiting only a klick away. Their dark visage frightened off Zako’s thugs, who had almost certainly come to harass Thorn. As the pair boarded, the purge trooper scanned their ident code, locking the exits and opening the cockpit. “Your fate will be decided by the Emperor,” they told him, tapping a message into their commlink.

“Whatever you say, Sir. If I’m gonna end up dead anyways, do me a solid and get it over with now?”

Predictably, the purge trooper did not react. 

Thorn settles in for a long trip. Really, this must be his last flight. There’s no coming back when the Imps pick you up. At least he’ll be dying with his brothers close by— even if those brothers had been brainwashed and broken. This was  _ aay’han _ , he supposes. 

“ _ Ni su’cuyi, gar kyr’adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum. Ni yaim’ol _ .”  _ I’m still alive, but you are dead, I remember you, so you are eternal. I’m coming home. _ “You got any brothers left, Purge?”

(It hears the question, but it ignores it, watching the blue streaks of hyperspace fly by. It is several hours before it receives a comm back, and it opened the message.)

Thorn blinked as the cloaked man appeared, and as the purge trooper dropped into a deferential kneel. 

“I sensed a great turmoil in your last message,” the figure drawled, and he shuddered. Palpatine. The self-proclaimed Emperor. “Submit yourself for reprogramming upon landing. The defector will be admitted to the medical facilities to identify and mend its defect.”

“Yes, Lord Sidious,” the purge trooper uttered, even as the call ended, but Thorn barely heard as blood roared in his ears. 

“Kill me.”  _ No, no one can dig around in my brain, not again! _ “Say I fought, that I tried to escape, I really don’t care. Just not… not that,  _ please _ .”

(An unfamiliar feeling dug its way into its chest, and the purge trooper scowled as it began cleaning his armor. Chestplate. It had heard those pleas how many times before? Pauldrons. Too many. Shin guards. It had never done this to it before. Kama. Reprogramming was clearly necessary. Helmet.)

He buried his face in his hands, feeling his body shaking. “Please,  _ please _ , just send me marching ahead. It would be easy. Just, just one bolt, between the eyes. I can’t live through that. Not again. I’m begging you—”

Thorn looked up into eyes darker than the visor they had been hidden behind, but every stitch as lifeless. But what his own gaze snapped to was the scores of tiny scars littering the purge trooper’s face, as if someone had smashed a glass bottle into their face years ago. His eyes traveled up, a terrible dread coiling in his gut as he looked at hair that could have been made of fire with its vibrance, spikes flattened slightly by time hidden under a helmet.

“Good soldiers follow orders,” they—  _ it _ , whatever was parading around in the skin of this clone was not a human— said, and returned to scrubbing at its helmet. 

Memories flash in his mind’s eye, of following around a cadet a little less than two years older than him, with a halo of flame-colored hair adorning his head like a crown. Of Geonosis, when he was still just a bit too small for his armor, the crimson-and-white painted commander shielding him from a B2’s blast. Of the adoption vow he had painted inside his chestplate, seared away as he took his last stand on the landing pad of Scipio.

“ _ Buir _ ?” He scrambles up, cuffs chafing at his wrists, but he couldn’t care less. “You— you’re  _ alive _ ?”

There is nothing for a moment.

(He/it recoils, hands flying to his/its head as a searing pain ripped through it, his/its body spasming. Harsh armored fingertips dug deep into his/its scalp, hard enough to draw blood and make his/its eyes water, before once again the man/machine that had once upon a time been Marshal Commander Fox was drowned out by a chorus of  **GOODSOLDIERSFOLLOWORDERS GOODSOLDIERSFOLLOWORDERS GOODSOLDIERSFOLLOWORDERS** .

Its spasming calmed, and it was once again placid.)

“ _ Buir _ !” Thorn was beside his father, alarm shooting through his body and mind alike, but whatever fit had overcome the purge trooper was gone, and it stared at him with dead eyes, even as blood dripped steadily down its temples. 

He pulled the hands away, running his fingers gingerly over the bloody gouges. “You should get someone to treat that.”

It twitched again, face twisting into anguish, as it— he?— drew sharply away. An arm raised, shakily pointing over Thorn’s shoulder, and he felt his cuffs unlock. 

Thorn glanced back, seeing the entrance to an escape pod. He bit hard on his lip, and when he looked back to his father, there was nobody there but the terrifyingly empty expression of whatever had taken residence in his body. 

He pressed a desperate keldabe to its forehead anyway, seeing the flicker of recognition and agony behind the steel walls in its eyes, and bit back a whimper. “I love you,  _ buir _ . I’ll come back for you, I swear it on my name.”

The clone grabs the purge trooper by the face, and slammed its head against the floor, watching as it immediately went slack with unconsciousness. 

“I promise I’ll come back.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Shadow finds an old friend. A brother, Fallen.

Kashyyyk was… lonely. Well, that’s not quite true. It was filled to bursting with life and emotions and relationships.

Quinlan Vos was just disconnected from it. 

He watched with tired eyes as an escape pod slammed into the trees, sending up dirt and wood splinters everywhere. Nobody came to Kashyyyk unless it was to enslave the natives, but the last time an escape pod landed here, it had been him in it, desperate to flee from Thire and the men he had called his brothers. 

So he approached it, ‘saber held loosely in his hand.

A familiar voice— far too familiar, one that made his blood run cold— was rambling.

“Kark,  _ kark, _ of all the  _ Manda-damned _ … Prime’s  _ rotting corpse _ …” A man collapsed against the thick trunk of a tree, heaving with wretched sobs.

Quinlan went absolutely still as his grip tightened. A clone. A clone, one of the millions that had turned on him and his family, slaughtered his friends and his  _ Padawan _ and leaving him with nothing but shattered bonds. 

“Of  _ course _ he’s still alive,” the clone mumbled thickly, and Quinlan drew closer, preparing to ignite his blade. “A good death and a peaceful passing was too damn much to ask for.” His hands were raking through dark curls, a motion so familiar that the Jedi wanted to vomit. “A karking  _ puppet _ . They strung him up and jerked him around like a kriffing  _ toy _ .”

His ‘saber lit up, the telltale  _ hiss _ breaking the silence of the ancient forest. Green light illuminated the makeshift armor on the clone, neither Republic nor Imperial. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t cut you down.”

He looked up, eyeing the blade and then the Jedi holding it. “Quin… yesterday, I’d have said to do it, but today… Today, no. I’ve got  _ osik _ to do before I die.”

“Thorn.” Quinlan would recognize his presence if he was Force-blind. Still, his grip only tightened, arm rigid. “Kill any Jedi children lately?”

“Kill…  _ what _ ? No! I would… no, never. Not children. Zako knew not to push that far. Never children.”

The Force rung with his truth, and Quinlan wanted to recoil from it. “Then  _ what _ ? Come to off me and deliver my head to the Emperor? Maybe finish what Bly started and kill the last of my lineage?” The accusation burned with grief and bitterness. 

“The  _ Emperor _ had better karking choke on his own Manda-damned Force  _ banthakark _ .” The venom in his words were powerful, angry, but just as soon as it had come, the vicious hate gave way to pain. “Fox… they…  _ kark _ .”

Quinlan felt his arm drop, ‘saber shutting off. The anger in his veins faded, leaving nothing but apathy. Thorn had died on Scipio— or, apparently not. But whatever happened, he wasn’t around to stab him in the back when the Order was issued. He dropped down onto the soft earth beside the former commander. “What’s going on, brother?” For once, the moniker didn’t come out bitter or angry. Just tired.

“A purge trooper found me on Scipio. I went with him— thought dying near a brother would be better than dying alone. Emperor wanted to dig through my brain, find out how I escaped… I begged him to kill me.”

“You look pretty alive to me.”

“It was Fox, Quin. The purge trooper was  _ Fox _ — or, or he used to be. He let me escape.”

Fox. It’d been… so, so long since he’d heard that name, or remembered what had once come with it. 

The long nights after Scipio, when Fox held Hammer and cried (there had been no body to retrieve, and now they knew why) while Quinlan sat next to him, offering silent support as he went through the datawork that was technically Fox’s, but was in no state to do it himself. 

Recovering from a sniper shot in the medbay as the commander lectured him about spatial awareness and  _ using whatever’s in that empty skull of yours _ . 

Eye contact that lasted just a heartbeat too long. Standing with brushing arms, even when the room was empty and they had plenty of room to move. Answering comms even when it was the dead of night, just to fill the void with each other’s voices. 

Friendship that could have been something more. 

“Purge troopers don’t let anyone escape,” he found himself saying. “You die, or they die.”

“He was still in there. It hurt him, but he let me go.”

Quinlan closed his eyes, wondering how it had come to this. What had happened to the Jedi, to the clones. 

“We’ll figure this out,” he told Thorn. “Come on. We have to make camp for the night.”

Acolyte opened the door to the reprogramming room just as the purge trooper collapsed, its body writhing under the strain the electrical currents put it through. 

When it rose again, muscles still twitching, Acolyte scowled at a face identical to his own. These pathetic beings had no right to share his face, no right to have survived Knightfall, but Master promised him that he was better than all of them.

Out of millions of clones, Acolyte had been the only one gifted. 

“Purge Unit CC-1010.”

It stared back at him, expressionless and waiting, and Acolyte wondered idly how often it had been reprogrammed this month alone. Purge Unit CC-1010 was gifted, in that it— unlike several other purge troopers— retained some form of independent intelligence, which was both a blessing and a curse. It could adapt and thrive, but it often… broke its programming, requiring yet another spell in the reprogramming room to remove its defects. 

“Mission report, Scipio.”

“Former commander CC-7041 was found on Scipio,” it recited tonelessly. “It was arrested without struggle. On the flight back, the unit glitched, allowing CC-7041 to overpower it and flee via escape pod.”

He scowled blackly. A waste of his time, yet Master was sending him anyway. “According to the tracker on the pod, CC-7041 crashed on Kashyyyk. You will accompany me as I track and detain it. Understood, CC-1010?”

“Yes, Inquisitor Acolyte.”

As he turned, Acolyte beckoned the purge trooper, and for a moment, idly thought about the time before he was Acolyte. When CC-1010 and CC-7041 were his closest brothers. When he was nothing more than a pathetic medic that had named himself Cross. 

Acolyte couldn’t help the snarl that rumbled in his chest. How stupid he had been. How  _ weak _ , stooping so low as to believe that those two were his equals. 

His eyes glowed gold, a feral grin stretching across his face, even as a piece of his mind he had long since buried screamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so Acolyte/Cross is a friend's OC. AERO_Dynamic came up with him and is letting me use him for this. Cross is a Force-sensitive medic who, after the Order, was taken by Palpatine and warped into the Acolyte, an Inquisitor.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments about what you thought. They help me write and reading them always makes my day.


End file.
